Three minutes and forty-three seconds of intensive warfare with Iraqi insurgents—caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America’s most sought-after heroes. Now they’re on a media-intensive nationwide tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. On this rainy Thanksgiving Day, the Bravos are guests of a Dallas football team, slated to be part of the halftime show.

Among the Bravos is nineteen-year-old Specialist Billy Lynn. Surrounded by patriots sporting flag pins on their lapels and support our troops bumper stickers, he is thrust into the company of the team’s owner and his coterie of wealthy colleagues; a born-again cheerleader; a veteran Hollywood producer; and supersized players eager for a vicarious taste of war. Over the course of this day, Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those missing, face a heart-wrenching decision and discover pure love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years.

Poignant, riotously funny, and exquisitely heartbreaking, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a searing and powerful novel that has cemented Ben Fountain’s reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.

Ben Fountain is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. He has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers' Award, among other honors and awards. He and his family live in Dallas.

Pajiba

San Francisco Chronicle

Reviewed by Adam Langer
on
Dec 18 2012

...given all the brilliance that has come before, maybe hoping for a more satisfying wrap-up would be expecting too much. And anyway, when the Pulitzer committee announces its finalists and I'm recalling the best books I read in 2012, I'm pretty sure that I'll have forgotten the ending entirely.

The New Zealand Herald

Reviewed by Graham Reid
on
Sep 06 2012

....pulls together a powerful and focused narrative, believable characters either enjoying or enduring their moment, and some humour to leaven the pain of them being in this hyper-heated crucible of media and public attention.